I don't usually bother to post "breaking news" here, but I've recently seen two acquisitions by Microsoft that seem worth noting. On July 14, the company announced purchase of data quality software vendor Zoomix, and just today it announced purchase of data appliance vendor DATAllegro. Both deals seem to represent an attempt to make SQL Server a more complete solution--in terms of data preparation in the Zoomix case, and high-end scalability with DATAllegro.
Of the two deals, the DATAllegro one seems more intriguing, only because DATAllegro was so obviously not built around SQL Server to begin with. The whole point of the product was to use open source software (the Ingres database in this case) and commodity components. Switching to the proprietary Microsoft world just seems so, well, different. The FAQ accompanying the announcement makes clear that the DATAllegro technology will only be available in the future in combination with SQL Server. So anyone looking for evidence of a more open-systems-friendly Microsoft will have to point elsewhere.
The Zoomix acquisition seems more straightforward. Microsoft has been extending the data prepartion capabilities of SQL Server for quite some time now, and already had a pretty impressive set of tools. My concern here is that Zoomix actually had some extremely flexible matching and extraction capabilities. These overlap with other SQL Server components, so they are likely to get lost when Zoomix is assimilated into the product. That would be a pity.
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